The Fellowship of Lifea Christian-based vegetarian group founded in 1973

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Letters

Sad aspect of animal experiments

Sir, - There will be many of your readers who, like myself, are
appalled at the facts put before us in the advertisement inserted by the
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.

Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of this whole situation is the
fact that Christians have never yet seen it as a vital part of their
Christian commitment to end horrors like this in the world.

For myself, I am terrifyingly conscious of an aspect of vivisection
which never seems to have struck others. Having weighed all the
arguments, and having tried, and failed to understand the mentality of
the perpetrators of experiments on living animals, I have come to the
conclusion, in the coolest of moral judgements, that any men and women
who can inflict suffering upon any of God's sentient creatures are the
potential administrators of concentration and death-camps, such as we
saw under the Nazis.

I am aware that the immediate reaction to such a statement will be
that these people are, in fact, not monsters, but ordinary, decent
people working for the good of humanity.

It seems to me, therefore, that all Christians have a moral
responsibility, not only to abolish the mechanism of laboratory
experiments on animals, but also to pray constantly for a change of mind
and heart in all engaged in such experiments.